During the first years of her daughter’s life, Lilian Schmidt remembers bedtime as a daily struggle.
She and her fiancé spent about three hours each evening trying to create a calm environment before bed, which led to power struggles and tears.
Then Schmidt got some parenting advice from an unlikely source: ChatGPT. It suggested the opposite: letting her daughter jump and exercise some energy before bed. The first night Schmidt tried it, she said her daughter was asleep within five minutes.
Since then, she’s started using ChatGPT to help her with everything from organizing to-do lists to developing meal prep recipes. “I definitely feel a lot calmer,” Schmidt, 33, told Business Insider. “My brain finally stopped working.”
Schmidt, who makes TikToks about using ChatGPT prompts and sells a “vault” of pre-made prompts that other parents can use, said she uses her free time to exercise, read or just enjoy time with her daughter and stepson without worrying about parenting logistics.
Schmidt is not alone. Parents are using AI tools for everything from homework help to activity ideas.
“Parents are pulled in many different directions, with sometimes 10 to 15 emails from school a day, work stressors, just keeping these different tasks organized,” Lorain Moorehead, a licensed therapist and professor at Arizona State University, told Business Insider. She said she’s seen more parents using AI tools as a “great support” for tasks like keeping their children on schedule.
As more parents use AI for help, it can be a practical tool when used correctly.
The tightrope of work and parenthood
For many parents, balancing childcare and full-time employment seems untenable. They also don’t feel like they have any other choice.
Schmidt and his family live in Zurich, the 5th most expensive city in the world. In addition to a very high cost of living, caring for her 4-year-old daughter costs around 30,000 Swiss francs per year, or more than $37,000.
“Almost everyone I know is working,” Schmidt said, while moms are also feeling the pressure to be more present at home. “It’s like, ‘You have to work, but actually, it would also be great if you stayed home.'”
This lifestyle poses logistical challenges. Like many parents in the United States, Schmidt and his partner live hours away from both grandparents. Outside of daycare and school, they are solely responsible for their daughter and Schmidt’s 14-year-old stepson.
Schmidt said balancing work and raising children leads to burnout. Lilian Schmidt
Moorehead, who said many of her clients use AI tools for co-parenting, said a common prompt is asking for help with planning. For example: “Create a sample schedule for a child who has 30 to 45 minutes of homework, comes home at 3:30 p.m., and goes to bed at 8 p.m. Bath time takes 20 minutes and he has to rinse the dishes after dinner. »
She recommends this prompt to parents because “as soon as they run it, there might be a change in the schedule.”
Schmidt said ChatGPT is especially helpful for families like hers, where her children have a huge age gap and require completely different schedules and care. “Basically, they live in different universes,” she said.
Tools like ChatGPT can quickly change the schedule to accommodate baseball practice starting later, rather than allowing a frustrated parent to do it alone and burn out in the process.
A parenting coach on demand
Moorehead said she generally recommends prompts like these that “are clear, stick to the facts, and don’t use phrases like ‘what do you think?'” or seek reassurance. Best used is to look at examples and options when you’re stuck as a parent.
“As a busy mom, I find that meal planning is often a mental drain, especially when trying to meet the needs of selective eaters,” Ijeoma Nwaogu, a mother of three, wrote in an essay for Business Insider. An example prompt she uses is: “I have picky eaters who don’t like spicy foods. Meals need to be delicious for the kids. I have chicken, rice, seasonings, oil. Create a recipe.”
Ijeoma Nwaogu and her family. Blue Iguana Media
For example, Schmidt said she uses ChatGPT for to-do lists or meal planning — taking an inventory of everything she has at home, to generate lists of swaps for cheaper ingredients or to take into account discounts from a nearby grocery store, and to modify existing recipes to fit each family member’s dietary preferences.
Moorehead said these types of prompts are generally acceptable. She advised against asking ChatGPT to weigh in on a parenting scenario, as AI tools are likely to be very biased. She also recommended looking into AI platforms like Perplexity, which are known for citing sources.
Of course, AI is no substitute for a real pediatrician or a real mental health professional.
“De-identifying the child or the school seems like a good safety practice, just as we’re learning more about these patterns,” Moorehead said, adding that a good rule of thumb is to never include information that would track your child if they appeared on another platform.
Freed up for more quality time
Before using ChatGPT, Nwaogu felt like she was a pretty good mother.
“I found myself trapped in a cycle of questioning whether I was doing things right, whether I was doing enough,” she said.
Schmidt felt she couldn’t give her children as much attention as she would like. “I’m the type of mom who wants her childhood to be magical and to be remembered in a very positive way,” she said. “But for the first three and a half years, I was stuck in survival mode.”
Schmidt felt that instead of spending time with his daughter, his priority was managing the household and his job. She says she often receives similar comments from other parents, most of whom have very young children.
“I hear, ‘I try to be a good wife, I give it my all, and I still feel like a complete failure,'” Schmidt said. She feels like parents just don’t have enough support, and that AI isn’t just a productivity tool: it’s permission to do less, so parents can focus on being fully present with their children.
Schmidt has more time to spend with his children. Lilian Schmidt
Moorehead said that when parents try a parenting routine or technique, it often takes a few tries and reconfigurations to get into the groove. But they might give up quickly if it doesn’t work. AI can be ideal for making real-time adjustments or providing quick alternatives.
“If we can eliminate some of that fatigue with AI, it can have a really positive outcome,” Moorehead said.
Schmidt said days with her kids seem more special now that she’s no longer thinking about her to-do lists simultaneously. She recently took her daughter horseback riding, with Schmidt holding the horse. Before bed, she asked ChatGPT to write an age-appropriate story in the voice of a published author, recounting the day. He understood his daughter’s name and the emotions she felt, like pride or courage.
“When you are old and your children are all grown up, what will they remember you for?” Schmidt said. “Probably not for writing the perfect shopping list. They’ll remember you if you were there with them.”
